This is without doubt the top TCM news story of 2015. That a TCM doctor is the key person for the discovery of a pharmaceutical drug is quite astounding. Please view Tu Youyou's lecture on Nobelprize.org. It's a fascinating drug discovery story. 

The drug is artemisinin, a derivative from the plant qinghao, artemisia annua, also known as sweet mugwort. Interesting thing is that Dr. Tu did it by combing Chinese medical literature for herbs and formulas for malaria and testing them. She obtained extractions from qinghao in different ways but they did not work. Finally she was tipped off by a closer reading of one line in Ge Hong's 341 AD text "Emergency Formulas to Keep Up One's Sleeve" (shown in above photo from Dr. Tu's Nobel lecture presentation) that says Qinghao should be soaked in water and the juice squeezed out of it for treating malaria: vs. boiling it which is the common decoction method. She then started to explore cool extraction methods that finally led to success. Ge Hong was a most renowned Daoist scholar and philosopher. Actually he had one foot on Daoism and the other squarely on Confucianism but that is another story. Without a doubt, Ge Hong himself experimented with different extraction methods to find the most effective one for preparing qinghao for malaria.